Entities with substantial printing demands typically use a production printer. A production printer is a high-speed printer used for volume printing (e.g., one hundred pages per minute or more). Production printers include continuous-forms printers that print on a web of print media stored on a large roll.
A production printer typically includes a localized print controller that controls the overall operation of the printer, and a print engine (sometimes referred to as an “imaging engine” or a “marking engine”). The print engine includes one or more printhead assemblies, with each assembly including a printhead controller and a printhead (or array of printheads). An individual printhead includes multiple (e.g., hundreds of) tiny nozzles that discharge ink as controlled by the printhead controller.
Production printers typically have limited memory capacities for storing print data. This may cause a problem when a printer receives a print job in the PDF format, because a printer cannot initiate printing for a PDF print job until the entire PDF file has been stored in memory at the printer. If the PDF document is too large for the memory of the printer (e.g., 120,000 pages), the memory of the printer overflows before the entire job is loaded, meaning that printing for the job fails.